Notes

She is miserably unhappy throughout this period, but her unhappiness seems to stem at least as much from her fall from the grace of society and from her own troubled conscience as from her child’s birth and death, which are treated almost tangentially. Tess is sad when he dies, but she seems just as upset when villagers whisper about her in church—she even begins shunning daylight to avoid prying eyes. Tess’s early one-sidedness gives way to an identity crisis in which she is torn apart by her hatred of Alec, her guilt toward her family, her shame within society, and her disappointment in herself.

Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break a necessary social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly. (13.15)

John Holloway finds in her evidence of Hardy's increasing awareness of flaws within the traditional rural order that has hitherto functioned to establish a moral norm. question of'natural' versus artificial morality. Tess remains innocent according to natural morality

Tess thinks that she's broken a universal law – something natural and fundamental. But really, the only law that she's broken is a social law – one that humans invented. It's a "necessary" social law, the narrator adds (he doesn't go so far as to say that the taboo against pre-marital sex is a bad one), but it's not a natural law. And notice also that he says that she was "made to break" that law – in other words, she isn't at fault, and the sin isn't hers